Brand is Emotional

We recently began working on a corporate communications project for an airline to determine how to align the brand the owners want to convey with a new internal communications ecosystem and external communications infrastructure that allows them to tell their story and build a culture to delver it.

I remembered reading in Ken Mosesian's book, The Power of Promise, that brand is emotional and experiential.  He said, "(E)ven though numbers are emotionless, people are not, particularly when it comes to promises kept and promises broken."  He went on to reference the Price Waterhouse Coopers 2018 survey where one-third of all global consumers said they would leave a brand they loved after one bad experience.  The study found three that that would stop customers from doing business with a brand:

1. lack of trust in the company
2. unfriendly service, and
3. bad employee attitude

This simple realty makes it essential to understand what promise the airline is making to its customers, to declare it an to delver it in every detail.  there is the story of the coffee stain on the tray table that always circulates when discussing airline experiences.  It is not just a coffee stain.  The human response to a the coffee stain on a tray table triggers a negative experience feedback that turns the coffee stain in a question of aircraft maintenance.  Then the customer is questioning the airworthiness because if they can't keep the cabin in order what is the condition of the aircraft?  Then the little negative feedback turns to the pilots.  With a dirty cabin and maybe an non-airworthy aircraft maybe they don;t have the best pilots.  The customer walks away judging the entire company based upon the negative experience they had because of a coffee stain. The passenger does not fly with the airline again and passes on the negative emotional state to other potential customers thinking about traveling on that airline.  All because one person with a bad attitude did not complete their tasks and wipe a coffee stain off a tray table.

It's impossible to deliver on the details without an employee group that understands and engages in the company mission, vision and purpose which form the company culture.  To this end, that requires the company to take the time to define its culture and provide a community in which that culture can flourish.

You make a experiential promise with your brand and your employees are given a chance to keep that promise every time they interact with a customer.  So, the details really do matter.